Amtrak Unlimited Friends, I am not sure if I posted about my Coast to Coast to Coast trip late November into December Amtrak round trip on the Capitol Limited and the California Zephyr. There are also photos of my quick Acela trip DC to Wimington and Christmas photos at Union Stations both in DC and Chicago. Here is the link to all my photos for this trip:FALL COAST TO COAST AMTRAK TRIP NOV-DEC 2016

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A Teaser: I depart on my now annual January Winter Trip on the California Zephyr January 23 and will be posting travel blogs as I travel to my travel blog REAGAN'S TRAVEL AND PHOTO GALLERIES Blog. You can also sign up to get the blog updates on the blog update pages where it says FOLLOW BY EMAIL.

I'm taking the California Zephyr from Sacramento to Chicago starting this Saturday. I've never taken it further east than Reno.

Then I'm taking the Capitol Limited to DC, where I hope to catch an Acela up to Philly. I've never taken the train west of Harpers Ferry.

Your photos were a great preview for me.

I am excited about taking my first cross country train trip albeit slightly apprehensive about 4 days and 3 nights on 3 different trains. I guess the biggest issue would be missing my "connection" in Chicago then having to rebook another sleeping accommodation to the east coast. It is a holiday weekend but the dead of winter. Fingers crossed all goes relatively smoothly.

If I'm a day late for my conference in Philly it's not a big deal, otherwise I would not be doing this trip by train. I fly back to Sacramento from Philly the following Sunday.

Thanks for sharing the photos. I look forward to reading about your trip.

Thanks, you will notice that when eastbound I go ahead and plan to stay overnight in Chicago and book a hotel room and then take the next day's Capitol Limited. When I did my trip we actually got to Chicago a couple hours late after dark but still in time to catch the Capitol Limited, but in the past week the connection has been "very close" and may have miss connected at least once.

I noticed today that because of the snow and flooding, the train has been cancelled between Truckee and Colfax for a couple days until the weather caused problems are resolved. Hopefully by the time you travel Amtrak will have resolved this situation. If not, they would probably bus you to Reno to begin the trip. I depart from Chicago on the Zephyr in just over two weeks so hope they work everything out by then.

We are expecting another big storm in Northern California starting Tuesday early. Several more inches of rain in the Valley and this time it is a colder system and there could be up to 7 FEET of snow in the high Sierra. It sounds like they might need to break out the rotary plows from Roseville and send them up the hill.

Just a couple of weeks ago I happened to catch a short documentary on the local PBS station about the rotary plows. I did not realize that sometimes many years go by where they are not needed.

The first time I took the CZ from Sac to Reno it was after a week of back to back winter storms. It was amazing how much snow was up there around Donner. The most recent time I took the train to Reno with a friend for the weekend (a couple of years ago) I could not believe how little snow there was.

It all gets cleared up by the time of my departure on Saturday it should be fascinating up there. I am concerned about a high risk of avalanches (not just for the CZ but for everyone) with the large snow that is expected and it falling on another large snow load that had lots of rain dumped on it the past few days. It could be mess up there. Even I-80 was closed for a time.

Exciting times ahead. I will be sure to bring extra snacks so that we don't have to resort to cannibalism if we get stuck.

If we do get bused to Reno that would not be awful since I have taken the Sac/Reno segment before, but it would be disappointing. We will both need to keep our fingers crossed the next couple of weeks.

Are you getting your statuses on the CZ from the Amtrak website or other sources? Thanks for the heads up about the closure between Truckee and Colfax right now. I suppose fright traffic is being rerouted to points north or south.

I am not getting my info from Amtrak website. I use a couple sources mainly this one: Dixieland Software and sometimes of a forum called TrainOrders which I do not belong to. Using the Dixieland Amtrak Status Reports, I cofirmed that today's arriving 5 was turned in Reno and became 6. According the TrainOrders both yesterday's arriving 5 and the departing 6 were joined into a double train and returned to Emeryville/Oakland where I guess they will stay until the tracks over the Nevadas are open. The CZ 5 arriving tomorrow is still shown in Service Disruption whlle traveling pretty much on schedule into Utah so they may be thinking it may be turned in Reno tomorrow to become Tuesday's CZ 6. Since I will be staying in Emeryville a couple days and then traveling on CS 11 to LAX, I am hoping we will at least be bused to Emeryville if tracks are still closed two weeks from now.

Thank you for the great information. I will check out the sites you mentioned. It is raining hard again in Sacramento so the Sierras are going to get slammed with snow today. It is much colder since this storm is from Alaska and not a Pineapple Express like the last storm. Even I-80 has had closures due to flooding, snow and avalanche control. It is supposed to clear up by the weekend so hopefully my cross country train trip will not be hosed.

Is there any chance that the ex-Western Pacific route through the Feather River canyon (the route of the original California Zephyr) could be used as a detour while the mainline over Donner Summit is closed?